What's up in emerging technology

What's up in emerging technology

A $12 Billion Takeover Says That Gene Therapy Cancer Cures Are Big Business

Pharmaceutical firm Gilead Sciences has just put up a cool $11.9 billion to acquire Kite Pharma, which has developed a genetic engineering approach for treating cancers.

The investment is a clear sign that gene therapy applied to cancer is a powerful—and commercially attractive—new technology. Kite, which is one of our 50 smartest companies of 2017, has developed a pioneering treatment for use against blood cancers such as lymphoma. It takes some of an individual's immune cells, known at T cells, then reprograms their DNA so that they can attack the disease. The resulting CAR-T therapy, as it’s known, is one of several being developed by the likes of Novartis and Juno Therapeutics to treat cancer, and they all appear to show huge promise for curing the disease.

The move is a clear sign that there’s huge commercial interest in the new form of cancer therapy. But the staggering valuation of Kite also hints at a potential problem for patients wishing to make use of the treatment in the future: cost. Just last week, Kaiser Health News ran a report on the potential pricing of the Novartis version of the therapy, and sources told it that it would "cost a fortune," proving to be "a quantum leap more expensive than other cancer drugs." No official pricing for such therapies has yet been published, but a figure of $649,000 for a one-off treatment has been deemed justifiable for young patients with leukemia by the U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.

That may change over time, though, especially if the the same technique is successfully used to develop treatments for other forms of cancer. The latter is certainly what Gilead is hoping will happen. “We see it as a nice, sustainable oncology platform for decades to come,” says Gilead CEO, John Milligan, to the Wall Street Journal.

Hedge Funds Are Increasingly Turning to AI—and That Might Be a Problem

Financial firms have generally been slow to accept artificially intelligent stock pickers. They have already invested billions collectively to bring in quantitative analysts, who do major number crunching as well as develop powerful non-AI algorithms.… Read more

Financial firms have generally been slow to accept artificially intelligent stock pickers. They have already invested billions collectively to bring in quantitative analysts, who do major number crunching as well as develop powerful non-AI algorithms. Some argue that there isn’t a lot of easy money left on the table for AI to pick up.

Even so, hedge funds are now starting to turn to AI to give them an edge. Hedge fund managers, with their high fees (typically 20 percent of profits and 2 percent off the top of whatever an investor puts in), need to have healthy returns to justify the costs. And this year, two top-performing hedge funds have used machine learning to bump up their profits, according to the Wall Street Journal. One firm said that AI accounts for more than 50 percent of its gains so far.

Not all firms are just getting into AI. One, called Voleon, was launched to start experimenting with machine learning for investing in 2008. It lost money until developing a second-generation platform that started bringing in profits in 2011—and continued through 2015. Voleon lost money in 2016, though, a sign that AI isn’t a surefire way to beat the markets.

But it’s in San Francisco, where new technology is always heartily embraced, that AI-powered investing might properly come of age. The Economist has just profiled two firms based there that are going big on using AI for investing, including a hedge fund called Numerai that encrypts all its data in a way meant to ensure that no bias can sneak into its systems.

What does that mean for the future of investing? There is a chance AI could make markets more volatile, right when they least need it. And a new report by the Financial Stability Board warns that AI doesn’t have a lot of data from past financial crises, and might not behave in a suitable way if another Great Recession or similar crash were to happen. What’s more, if hedge funds continue to bring AI into the mix, markets could tighten and become much more susceptible to big shocks.

The unfailingly polite tone of personal assistants like Siri and Alexa isn’t to everyone’s taste. Many in Russia, in fact, seem to prefer their AI helpers with sass and a dark sense of humor.

The Moscow-based tech giant Yandex launched a Russian-speaking personal assistant called Alice this October (pictured above, sans snark). And unlike Siri or Alexa, the program relies less on scripted responses than on what it’s learned by consuming conversational data mined from the Web, news articles, and even a little Russian literature.

As a result, Alice can respond to a much wider range of queries. However, some of program’s responses can be a bit surprising. “It’s the first conversational assistant to do chit-chat,” Misha Bilenko, who is head of machine intelligence research at Yandex, told me during the Neural Information Processing Systems conference last week. “But it’s a bit politically incorrect and unsympathetic.”

Bilenko says, for example, that those who tell Alice “I am sad” are quite likely to hear “No-one said it was going to be easy” in response. He says the chatbot with attitude has proved a huge success, attracting 1.5 million daily users in Russia and become the focus of a spoof presidential campaign on social media. Bilenko admits that some answers had to be hand-coded in order to prevent the system from being too inappropriate.

Alice reminds me of the experimental neural network chatbot (PDF) created by Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals at Google in 2015. This system was trained end-to-end on computer help-desk chat logs, and it could produce some remarkably good answers to questions, as well as many completely bizarre ones.

Alice, which is accessible through Yandex’s Web browser, also shows how different cultural attitudes toward AI tools are likely to shape the technology’s progress. And let’s be fair: if you spent a lot of time reading Russian literature, you might develop a gloomy sense of humor too.

Editor's Pick

Digital Pills Track How Patients Use Opioids

New pill capsules that send a message to a smartphone as they move through the GI tract have emerged as a way to track whether patients are taking their medicine as prescribed. The problem of nonadherence to medication instructions causes about 125,000...

New pill capsules that send a message to a smartphone as they move through the GI tract have emerged as a way to track whether patients are taking their medicine as prescribed. The problem of nonadherence to medication instructions causes about 125,000 deaths a year and at least 10 percent of hospitalizations, according to one estimate.

As it Turns Out, the SEC Doesn’t Completely Hate ICOs

Hours after the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday that it had halted a second initial coin offering in less than a week, SEC chair Jay Clayton published a lengthy statement expressing his views on the controversial new fund-raising… Read more

Hours after the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday that it had halted a second initial coin offering in less than a week, SEC chair Jay Clayton published a lengthy statement expressing his views on the controversial new fund-raising schemes.

This piece first appeared in our new twice-weekly newsletter, Chain Letter, which covers the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Sign up here – it’s free!

Among other things, Clayton (that’s him, above) warned investors to be wary of cryptocurrency and ICOs, and urged them to do their due diligence. But he also said not all tokens are necessarily securities, so they may not all fall under the SEC’s jurisdiction. (What the Hell Is an ICO? ← Here’s a primer)

Monday’s cease-and-desist order focused on Munchee, a company whose ICO was supposed raise funds for a blockchain-based food review service. The company had claimed it would use proceeds from its token sale to build a network for itself and other companies to buy goods and services—the tokens were to be payment for review writers, a way for users to make in-app purchases, and a method for restaurants to buy advertising. But the SEC wasn’t having it, saying that Munchee was selling unregistered securities. Munchee and other promoters crossed the line, the regulator said, when they issued statements meant to convince investors that the tokens would increase in value on secondary trading markets.

Clayton explained, for example, that a “token that represents a participation interest in a book-of-the-month club may not implicate our securities laws, and may well be an efficient way for the club’s operators to fund the future acquisition of books and facilitate the distribution of those books to token holders.” But many ICOs are “more analogous to interests in a yet-to-be-built publishing house with the authors, books and distribution networks all to come,” he said. Promoters often lead investors to believe that they can profit from the tokens “based on the efforts of others.” These are “key hallmarks” of a securities offering, Clayton said.

Get The Download delivered to your inbox every day.

The Download

A Wannabe Tesla Rival Appears to Be on a Knife Edge

The electric-car startup Faraday Future is reported to be in dire financial straits. Its FF91 car is billed to have a 378-mile range, 1,050 horsepower, and a 0-to-60 time of 2.39 seconds—but reports suggest that there may never be enough money to actually… Read more

The electric-car startup Faraday Future is reported to be in dire financial straits. Its FF91 car is billed to have a 378-mile range, 1,050 horsepower, and a 0-to-60 time of 2.39 seconds—but reports suggest that there may never be enough money to actually build it.

Rumors of financial instability at Faraday Future have been swirling for over 12 months now. This time last year, we explained that the company was burning cash and running up debts. It didn’t help that the company was having employees work on a self-driving car project at sister firm LeEco, which was founded by Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting (usually known as YT).

But a new investigation by the Verge is even more damning. It argues that grandiose future visions, with their resulting excessive hiring and lavish spending on facilities, are taking a big toll on the startup. From the report:

Four high-level former employees with knowledge of the company’s finances told the Verge as recently as early December that, barring a new cash infusion, Faraday Future only has enough funds to keep its payroll afloat through the end of the year.

The report adds that YT “is still meeting with potential investors to keep the company alive,” but adds that Faraday Future sources “admit that YT is the main financial backer of the company.” To add to the bad news, the Financial Times now reports that YT has been blacklisted on China’s national debtors’ database for failing to pay off loans. So those potential investors really, really need to come through.

Unsurprising, then, that the Verge investigation also explains that workers are leaving Faraday Future, or often not turning up to work if they’re still in their jobs. And it’s hard to build a car without cash or workers.

Should We Have a Meat Tax?

Call it the burger lover’s dilemma: we know deep down that it’s awful for the planet, but the beef patty tastes so damn good.

Most of us still chow down. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that the average American consumed 211 pounds of meat per… Read more

Call it the burger lover’s dilemma: we know deep down that it’s awful for the planet, but the beef patty tastes so damn good.

Most of us still chow down. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that the average American consumed 211 pounds of meat per year in 2015, with that figure expected to rise to nearly 219 pounds by 2025. It’s especially troubling given that, according to the United Nations, global livestock accounts for 14.5 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions. If we could cut that appreciably, we’d be doing the planet a great favor.

Overcoming the craving isn’t easy. But according to the Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return (FAIRR) Initiative, a scheme run by the London private equity firm Coller Capital, our mouths may be forced. The group argues that it looks “increasingly probable” that meat taxes—much like those now added to tobacco, carbon, and sugar in many countries—will be introduced around the world in order to satisfy the targets set forth in the Paris climate agreement.

A tax would surely encourage consumption of plant-based protein. But FAIRR argues that it would also provide revenue that could, for instance, pay to treat health issues linked to excessive meat consumption, such as obesity, diabetes, and cancer.

It’s worth noting that FAIRR has an agenda: it was set up to highlight “investment risks and opportunities connected with intensive livestock farming and poor animal welfare standards.” But it’s far from alone in suggesting that a meat tax is a good idea: Denmark’s government, for instance, has considered such a tax, and British think tank Chatham House has encouraged the U.K government to do the same.

It’s not clear how much a tax would be, but Denmark suggested something around $1.20 per pound—which would add $250 to a typical American’s annual food bill. It’s a very particular (and brave) politician who would attempt to push through such reform.

Still, plant-based alternatives to meat are becoming increasingly impressive. (The meat-free burger that bleeds, made by Impossible Foods, is particularly good—I ate the firm’s “meatballs,” and they were delicious.) And, as Bloomberg notes, such startups are receiving increasing backing from environmentally aware billionaires like Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio. As meat-free fare becomes increasingly common and increasingly tasty, a meat tax may just become a little easier to swallow.

What Do Bitcoin Futures Mean for the Future of Bitcoin?

Great question, so glad you asked.

A big securities exchange in Chicago on Sunday began selling Bitcoin futures for the first time, something seen by many as an important step toward mainstream usage. But what this really means for Bitcoin and its users… Read more

Great question, so glad you asked.

A big securities exchange in Chicago on Sunday began selling Bitcoin futures for the first time, something seen by many as an important step toward mainstream usage. But what this really means for Bitcoin and its users is far from clear.

Futures contracts let traders bet on whether the price will rise or fall, without actually having to hold bitcoins. (Activity on Monday suggests that most expect the currency’s staggering price gains to slow in the coming months.) That will likely draw more traditional investors who are interested in Bitcoin but would like to avoid the hassle of storing the currency and keeping it secure from hackers.

The new contracts make it easier to short Bitcoin, and it’s possible that short sellers could come to dominate the futures market, which would push the price down. On the other hand, as Bloomberg’s Matt Levine points out, “so far every expansion of Bitcoin access has had the opposite effect.”

Microsoft Announces $50 Million for Its “AI for Earth” Project

There are plenty of stories about artificial intelligence ending the world as we know it (see 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, certain Elon Musk tweets). There are fewer about how AI could save the world, but believers are out there. At a gathering… Read more

There are plenty of stories about artificial intelligence ending the world as we know it (see 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, certain Elon Musk tweets). There are fewer about how AI could save the world, but believers are out there. At a gathering Monday for the two-year anniversary of the Paris climate accord, Microsoft announced a $50 million investment in its AI for Earth project that it believes can be a “game-changer for our planet.”

Microsoft launched AI for Earth over the summer with an initial $2 million, hiring Lucas Joppa to run it as the company’s chief environmental scientist—a role that, as far as Joppa knows, doesn’t exist at any other technology company. Since the launch, the company has given out 35 grants to groups in 10 countries. The new investment will support and expand upon the current projects as well as new ventures over the next five years.

“We’re impatient and a lot of partners are too,” Joppa told MIT Technology Review. “There isn’t enough money and resources for people doubling down on these issues.”

AI for Earth grants give groups access and training to use the Azure platform and other Microsoft AI products. The projects so far include producing a more precise land cover map of the Chesapeake Bay watershed for conservation work, a mosquito tracking program that lets researchers learn about wildlife populations through blood analysis (it also functions as an early-warning system for Zika outbreaks), and getting farmers more data to increase crop yields with fewer resources.

AI for Earth is, of course, good for Microsoft’s bottom line as well. Joppa said that if the technology works for small, cash-strapped groups often working in tough conditions in the field, Microsoft gets feedback for their products and clients can be assured that the system will work for them.

“Anytime we can stress-test the technology, the better,” he said.

And of course, AI talent retention and recruiting is a huge concern for the tech industry. Joppa said that AI for Earth and its mission are a draw for researchers and developers.

“Yes, you need to pay them,” he said. “But you need to give them meaningful things to work on.”

Self-Driving Cars Endanger Nearly Four Million Jobs but Could Create a $7 Trillion Industry

Fully autonomous vehicles would hit the U.S. workforce hard. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 3.8 million people operate motor vehicles for their livelihood. This includes truck driving, the most common profession in 29 U.S. states,… Read more

Fully autonomous vehicles would hit the U.S. workforce hard. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 3.8 million people operate motor vehicles for their livelihood. This includes truck driving, the most common profession in 29 U.S. states, which employs about 1.7 million people. As we have said before, autonomous trucks are likely to be the first autonomous vehicles to hit the roads, which would put all of these workers in a tough spot (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017: Self-Driving Trucks”).

Even as many jobs disappear or change, though, there will be new roles formed by autonomous vehicles. One that is already developing is that of a remote vehicle operator. These operators would be analogous to air traffic controllers at airports. They would monitor fleets of vehicles and lend assistance if a car or truck gets stuck. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, startups like Phantom Auto are already developing technology for these command centers.

What’s more, the robotic taxi rides of the future will be very different indeed from what we’re used to. A report from Intel predicts that as much as $7 trillion will be invested in the new “passenger economy” by 2050. There will be job openings for positions like masseuses and nail technicians to provide services during rides. But it’s not as though displaced workers will simply fall into these new professions. If you're a trucker, taxi driver, or delivery worker, it may not be too soon to start considering your next next career move.